The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (6 page)

This is not to say that all the perpetrators of the Holocaust were actuated by fears of miscegenation, though there is compelling evidence that this was indeed a strong motivation among many leading Nazis. Many of those who actively contributed towards genocide were motivated by crude material greed. Others were little more than morally blinkered cogs in a bureaucratic machine whose ‘cumulative radicalization’ they did not individually will. Some perpetrators were merely ordinary men acting under peer-group pressure or systematic military brutalization; others were amoral technocrats obsessed with their own pseudo-scientific theories; still others were brainwashed youths in the grip of an immoral secular religion. Nevertheless, we need to recognize that the racial world view was fundamental to the Third Reich and that this was rooted in a particular conception of human biology – a singularly successful ‘meme’ that had already replicated itself all over the world by the start of the twentieth century. It could be transmitted even to quite remote and seemingly unpro-pitious locations. In the late nineteenth century, Argentina was widely regarded as an ideal destination for Jewish emigrants from Europe precisely because of the absence of anti-Semitism. Yet by the early 1900s writers like Juan Alsina and Arturo Reynal O’Connor were warning that the Jews posed a mortal threat to Argentine culture.
‘Only a few years ago,’ lamented the Labour Zionist journal
Brot und Ehre
in 1910,

we could speak about Argentina as a new
Eretz Israel
, a land that opened generously its door for us, where we enjoyed the same freedom the Republic gives all its inhabitants, without distinction of nationalities or beliefs. And now? The whole atmosphere around us is filled with hatred of Jews, eyes hostile to Jews are staring from all corners; they lie in wait in all directions, awaiting an opportunity to attack… All are against us… And this is not simply a hatred of Jews; it is a sign of a future movement, which is long known [elsewhere] under the name of anti-Semitism.

Why did large-scale ethnic conflict occur in some places and not in others? Why in Central and Eastern Europe more than in South America? One answer to that question is that in certain parts of the world there was an exceptional mismatch between ethnic identities and political structures. The ethnic map of Central and Eastern Europe, to take the most obvious example, was a true patchwork (
Figure I.2
). In the north – to name only the largest groups – there were Lithuanians, Latvians, Byelorussians and Russians, all linguistically distinct; in the middle, Czechs, Slovaks and Poles; in the south, Italians, Slovenes, Magyars, Romanians and, in the Balkans, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Greeks and Turks. Scattered all over the region were German-speaking communities. Language was only one of the ways the different ethnic groups could be distinguished. Some of those who spoke German dialects were Protestants, some Catholics and some Jews. Some of those who spoke Serbo-Croat were Catholics (Croats), some Orthodox (Serbs and Macedonians) and some Muslims (Bosniaks). Some Bulgarians were Orthodox; others (the Pomaks) were Muslim. Most Turkic-speakers were Muslims; a few (the Gagauz) were Orthodox.

Figure I.2
Majority population as a percentage of total population

The political geography of Central and Eastern Europe before the nineteenth century had been consistent with this exceptionally heterogeneous pattern of settlement. The region had been divided between large dynastic empires. Most people had primarily local loyalties while at the same time owing allegiance to a remote imperial sovereign. Many had identities that defied rigid categorization, speaking more than one language; typically, Austrian demographers drew a distinction between ‘mother tongue’ and ‘language of everyday use’. Most Slavs continued to work the land, as they had as serfs before the emancipations of the nineteenth century. The towns of Central and Eastern Europe, by contrast, were often quite ethnically distinct from the surrounding countryside. In the north, Germans and Jews predominated in urban areas, as they also did in the basin of the Danube; further east the towns were inhabited by Russians, Jews and Poles. The towns of the Adriatic coast were often Italian; some Balkan towns were distinctly Greek or Turkish. Most striking of all were those cosmopolitan trading centres where no one ethnic group predominated. One of many examples that might be cited was Salonika, present-day Thessaloniki, an Ottoman port of Greek provenance where Jews slightly outnumbered Christians and Muslims. Each religious community could, in turn, be subdivided into sects and
linguistic sub-groups: there were Judesmo-speaking Sephardic Jews as well as Ashkenzim, Christian Greeks, Bulgarians and Macedonians – some speaking Greek, some Vlach, some a Slavic language – and myriad kinds of Muslim: Sufis, Bektashis and Mevlevis as well as Naqshbandis and Ma’min, who were converts from Judaism.

However, with the emergence after 1800 of the nation state as an ideal for political organization, these heterogeneous arrangements began to break down. A number of ethnic groups were sufficiently large and well organized that by the early twentieth century they had already established their own nation states – Greece, Italy, Germany, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania – though in each case there were ethnic minorities within their borders and diaspora groups beyond their borders.
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The Magyars enjoyed nearly all the privileges of independence as the junior partners within the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. The Czechs could aspire to some measure of political autonomy within Bohemia and Moravia. The Poles could dream of restoring their lost sovereignty at the expense of the three empires that had snuffed it out. But many other ethnic groups could not credibly aspire to statehood. Some were simply too few in number: Sorbs, Wends, Kashubes, Vlachs, Székelys, Carpatho-Rusyns and Lad-ins. Others were too scattered: the Sinti and Roma (often known, misleadingly, as Gypsies). Still others could aspire to build states only on the Ottoman periphery: the Jews and the Armenians.

The more the model of the nation state was applied to Central and Eastern Europe, then, the greater the potential for conflict. The discrepancy between the reality of mixed settlement – a complex patchwork of pales and diasporas – and the ideal of homogeneous
political units was simply too great. The stakes, as national borders took on increasing importance, were too high, and diverging birth rates only served to heighten the anxieties of those who feared minority status. It was, in theory, conceivable that all the different ethnic groups in a new state would agree to subsume their differences in a new collective identity, or to share power in a federation of equals. But it turned out to be just as likely that a majority group would set itself up as sole, or at least senior, proprietor of the state and its assets. The more functions the state was expected to perform (and the number of these functions grew by leaps and bounds after 1900) the more tempting it became to exclude this or that minority from some or all of the benefits of citizenship, while at the same time ratcheting up the costs of residence in the form of taxation and other burdens.

It is therefore no coincidence that so many of the locations where mass murder was perpetrated in the 1940s lay in precisely these regions of mixed settlement – in such many-named towns as Vilna/Wilna/Vilne/Vilnius, Lemberg/Lwów/L’viv and Czernowitz/Cernauti/Chernovtsy/Chernivtsi. Nor is it a coincidence that a significant number of leading Nazis came from beyond the eastern frontier of the German Reich of 1871. To give just a few examples: Alfred Rosenberg, author of
The Myth of the Twentieth Century
and a key figure in Nazi racial policy, was born in Reval/Tallinn, Estonia. The son of a German emigrant to Argentina, Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Agriculture, developed his version of racial theory while breeding horses in East Prussia. The Nazi Secretary of State Herbert Backe was born in Batumi, Georgia, where his mother’s peasant family had settled in the nineteenth century. Rudolf Jung, who grew up in the German enclave of Iglau/Jihlava in Bohemia, was only one of many Germans from the borderlands to attain high rank in the SS. Significantly, Breslau/Wrocław in Upper Silesia was one of those places where local Nazis campaigned most overtly for legislation against miscegenation in 1935. Austrians and Sudeten Germans supplied a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic contributions to the newspaper
Der Stürmer.
At least two of the small group of SS officers who ran the Bełżec death camp were so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ from the Baltic and Bohemia.

Yet Central and Eastern Europe was only the most lethal of the
‘killing spaces’ of the twentieth century. As will become clear, there were other parts of the world that shared some of its key characteristics: a multi-ethnic population, shifting demographic balances and political fragmentation. Considered as a single region, the nearest equivalent at the other end of the Eurasian landmass was Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. In the later part of the twentieth century, for reasons explored in the epilogue to this book, the zones of intense conflict shifted – to Indo-China, Central America, the Middle East and Central Africa. But it is on the first two regions that we must focus our attention if we are fully to grasp the peculiarly explosive character of the fifty-year war of the world.

Why has extreme violence occurred only at certain times? The answer is that ethnic conflict is correlated with economic
volatility
. It is not enough simply to look for times of economic crisis when trying to explain social and political instability. A rapid growth in output and incomes can be just as destabilizing as a rapid contraction. A useful measure of economic conditions, too seldom referred to by historians, is volatility, by which is meant the standard deviation of the change in a given indicator over a particular period of time. Reliable estimates of gross domestic product are unfortunately available for only a few countries for the entire century. However, figures for prices and interest rates are easier to come by, and these make it possible to measure economic volatility with some degree of precision for a substantial number of countries.

A straightforward and testable proposition is that times of high volatility were associated with socio-political stresses and strains. It is certainly suggestive that, for the seven major industrialized economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) the volatility of both growth and prices reached its highest point between 1919 and 1939 and declined steadily in the post-Second World War period (see
Figure I.3
). Economic historians were preoccupied for a long time with the identification of economic cycles and waves of various amplitudes. They tended to overlook

Figure I.3
Volatility: standard deviations for inflation and growth, G7 economies, 1880–2004

changes in the frequency and amplitude of booms and busts. Yet precisely these were and remain crucial. If economic activity were as regular as the seasons, the expectations of economic actors would adjust accordingly and we would be no more surprised by spurt of growth or a crash than we are by the advent of summer and winter. But it was precisely the unpredictability of twentieth-century economic life that produced such strong shifts in what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’ of employers, lenders, investors, consumers and indeed government officials.

Over the past hundred years, there have been profound changes in the structure of economic institutions and the philosophies of those who run them. Prior to 1914, the degree of freedom in the international mobility of goods, capital and labour was unprecedented and has only recently and partially been equalled. Governments wereonly justbegin-ning to extend the scope of their operations beyond the provision of security, justice and other elementary public goods. Central banks were at least to some extent constrained in their operations by self-imposed
rules fixing the values of national currencies in terms of gold; this made for long-run price stability, though also higher volatility ingrowth than we are now accustomed to. These things changed radically during and after the First World War, which saw a significant expansion of the role of government and a breakdown of the system of fixed exchange rates known as the gold standard. It seemed to many contemporaries that there was a conflict between what international market forces could do in allocating goods, workers and capital optimally, and what governments ought to strive for – for example, maintaining or raising levels of industrial employment, stabilizing the prices of primary products or altering the distribution of income and wealth. Yet the inter-war experiments with protective tariffs, deficit finance, confiscatory taxation and floating exchange rates generally had the unintended consequence of magnifying economic fluctuations. Planned economies did better, but at a considerable cost in both efficiency and freedom. Though the records of both the welfare state and the planned economy were markedly better in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, it was only by moving back in the direction of the free market after 1979 that governments were able to achieve relative stability in prices and growth. Only since 1990 has it been possible for some commentators to speak tentatively of the ‘death of volatility’ – though it remains to be seen how far this represents the improvement of international economic institutions, how far the success of fiscal and monetary pragmatism at the national level and how far simply a fortunate and quite possibly ephemeral conjuncture between Western profligacy and Asian parsimony.